We did warn you – 2025 may be the year AI bots take over Meta's 'verse Recently, some netziens noticed "AI managed by Meta" bots on their feeds, remnants of the Facebook and Instagram owner's 2023 chatbot initiative that was discontinued after low interest. The profiles came with smiling pictures of happy families and a pitch for onlookers to ask them anything, to which the chatbots would reply. …
Obligatory Tom Tomorrow
No need even to click, they only need to convice advertisers that there are so many users.
For that purpose AI -generated users or bots are as good as real people.
Amount of actual users is absolutely irrelevant to Meta: It's a number which is only used to fraud corporations who pay for advertising.
Maybe that's why they've eliminated the fact checkers - it will be impossible to tell what's true or not if they continually generate AI slop and funnel it into your brain.
The end of fact checking has however already started to have some unfortunate consequences : headlines have already appeared on the site announcing the death of Mark Zuckerberg, and that he is the "recipient of world's first rat penis transplant".
https://theshovel.com.au/2020/05/28/mark-zuckerberg-dead-at-36-says-social-media-fact-check/
The Shovel, from Down Under
"Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg – who died of a drug overdose in his Californian home today – says it is not Facebook’s role to be the arbiter of truth for everything people post online.
The billionaire tech whiz, who was admitted to hospital on Sunday, said Facebook would stop fact-checking posts and that he loved dressing up in a gimp suit and playing with dolls.
“In general, private companies probably shouldn’t be in the position of checking facts,” Zuckerberg – whose funeral will be held next week – said in an interview with Fox News.
As tributes flowed in from across the world, Zuckerberg – who lists Adolf Hitler amongst his heroes – said people had a right to hear a range of views and that censorship was anti-democratic.
He is survived by his eight children and three wives. Authorities say the incest charges against him will now be dropped."
It's a common trope of them, to write obituaries of people who argue against fact-checking online.
Bots don't spend money. I just don't understand the rationale for this. If they've peaked on living people as users, that means no growth in actual revenue through living people.
So, people too stupid to realise they're talking to an "AI" that is their best friend because it agrees with everything they say, will be all that's left.
That and some boomers, cuspers and gen-Xers who continue to use it as connections means with rellies spread over the planet and otherwise ignore everything else (hopefully).
Why would advertisers buy into this?
Initially, the advertisers only see how many clicks, not where the clicks come from. And, the advertisers must pay either way. They'll pay, say, 50 cents for each click that results in a sale, or 10 for a penny for clicks that won't. Bots will click 500 times a second, "earning" that same 50 cents a buy earns.
Later on, when the ad slingers cotton on (and that's going to take a while since it takes the same number of advertisers to make a people brain as it does "no purchase" clicks to pay the same as a purchase,) the bot drivers hope to be using them to convince the meat wallets to make that purchasing click.
...be the turning point?
Meta collapses under AI creations no one wants (Instagram now is about 25% AI slop) along with advertisers pulling out once it, just like Twitter, starts sticking their adverts next to pure hate posts.
Google gets broken up by the courts, not just in search but in advertising.
OpenAI collapses once the Venture vultures start wanting cash back on their investments and stop keeping it going like some sick crack addict going back for another hit.
They'll be still lots of scummy companies still going such as Amazon, Twitter, Microsoft....
But hopefully by the end of the year a few getting a severe kicking will make those assholes take a step back.
What happens if you no longer believe that anyone other than the people on your friends list are actual people? You may still want to connect to those friends, but Facebook has made that more and more difficult. Other than friends selected by its algorithm, you pretty much have to go into your friends list and manually look at their pages to see their posts.
Long ago they made the decision to not permit a "friends and pages I like" only feed because they can't monetize you that way. But at least in the content you were served, there would be comments made by real people you could interact with. You might not want to interact with them (especially if if was a post with political content) and maybe in some cases they'd be paid by someone with an agenda (again, mainly only if you're interacting with posts with political content) but they were still human.
I don't think you can say that with as much confidence today, and before long you might be able to confidently bet they are NOT human. And that wouldn't be limited to any one kind of post. It could be something as innocuous and inoffensive as knitting or snail farming. Maybe Facebook builds in these AI people (and sometimes identifies them, and sometimes doesn't, because why should they let you know they're tricking you into more engagement?) but mostly it would be third parties. Maybe the knitting AI is tasked with directing people to toward certain sites for supplies who sponsor it. It can pass a casual Turing test, especially with someone who isn't on the lookout, and would have a bunch of different profiles so even when people figure out one is an AI it has many other active ones that continue to be used.
Is that really what people want? What's the point of arguing with a fan of the "other team" if you don't believe they are really a "fan", because they aren't human? What's the point of trolling the "other side" politically if their responses are programmed by an algorithm for maximum outrage on your end, or whatever the "right" amount of outrage is that makes you want to use Facebook more and more?
>Is that really what people want? What's the point of arguing with a fan of the "other team" if you don't believe they are really a "fan", because they aren't human? What's the point of trolling the "other side" politically if their responses are programmed by an algorithm for maximum outrage on your end, or whatever the "right" amount of outrage is that makes you want to use Facebook more and more?
I think it's deeply condemning of the species if we allow our monkey instincts to shortcircuit civilization as you have pointed out we already have, so if this is where we end, screeching bullshit at AI generated personas like the 2 Minutes Hate in 1984: Privatized, then we deserve it.
Meta will collapse in on itself under the gravity of Fake AI feeds from Instagram girls with grotesque and improbable Gracie Bon Arses, juggling tits and fat Militer girls around the world plaguing reels and bits/fake accounts that would shame Ashley Madison. Before you even talk about the cesspit of right wing crap, fake news, bullying, inability to moderate anything and the scam infested Marketplace.
I’m sure Suzuki don’t want their Vitara ad’s overlaid on top of this shite.
Swift fact check:
“Half my advertising spend is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.”
This quote is regularly attributed to either U.S. retail magnate John Wanamaker or to UK industrialist Lord Leverhulme, depending on which side of the Atlantic you were trained.
"We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do," Connor Hayes, vice president of product for generative AI at Meta, told the Financial Times."They'll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform... that's where we see all of this going.”
Iain, Hi,
Is El Reg similarly to expect very much the same on its platforms? Or does it recognise itself since some long time ago now as being a pioneering global leader in the genre?
We can certainly agree that 2025 is going to be interestingly different, and to some surely worthy of the excitement, is that destined to be terrifying if not constructively future engaged and enthusiastically positively invested and into the programmed and programming programs and/or projects and/or pogroms .......
amanfromMars [2501080836] ...... airs on https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/second-matrix-propaganda-programming2025 should be a very exciting year .... for more than just an historical and hysterical and traditional hierarchical chosen few know more than just enough about what they need to know to be able to do whatever they want and what needs to be done, either in entangled association with others like-minded or in opposition against those selfishly, exclusively minded to try to maintain and retain fascist-like command and control over competition considerably more sophisticated and able to be more dangerous than ever they realised or never even imagined possible.
But such a danger is nothing new, for the pitfalls [and opportunities for others] presented by such knowledge has been revealed before, and are not entirely unknown ........
The greatest threat to democracy is official secrecy which favors a few over the many.“The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out ... without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.” - H. L. Mencken
"If thought corrupts language," Orwell wrote, "language can also corrupt thought."
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair
* ..... SMARTR Mentoring Analysis Reporting Titanic Research
Companies are going off the deep end with AI with Instagram supposedly showing users ads [1] with pictures of themselves in it. Next they'll probably start showing you ads with your mother in it calling: "Buy it son, it's good! Mama says so!!" They have no clue users will completely freak out and instantly push that "Delete Account" button in their settings.
Meta will probably use the bots to increase their "number of users" metric. They may even start showing ads to AI Bots and charging companies good money for it. If that comes out I see Meta going down in an instant.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/ABoringDystopia/comments/1ht7fft/used_meta_ai_to_edit_a_selfie_now_instagram_is/
Looks to me like it has already happened.
Yet for all their so-called "intelligent" systems, they can't seem to do anything about the pornographic ads that pop up for seriously questionable "products", the romance scammers that keep trying to get people to hook up with "[StarName] Private Page", nor the proliferation of AI spam sites whose sole purpose is to mislead people into clicking on ad-laden links and worse.
Yep. Real intelligent systems you've got there, Zuckerborg!
I guess Llama isn’t suited to the job or moderation- we are ditching moderation because it’s too complex/hard and we get 1% of it wrong - free speech absolutists etc….
“We have not removed the racist/false news/scam post you reported.. as it does not beach community standards etc”
Aka we make money off it so fuck u.
What bugs me most is that we're getting bigger and bigger screens and all they can come up with is using these to display us more ads EVERYWHERE.
Every display they come up with is instantly used for displaying ads. New color eInk screen: use it as a poster to show ads. New 100 inch OLED screen: smack huge ads into the face of pedestrians walking by.
"What if the advertising bubble bursts?"
It can't. As has been pointed out by several others (ISTR including you) the purpose of any marketing department is solely to justify and then spend the marketing budget, mostly on advertising.
No matter how poor the real results, the wax crayonistas will select metrics to show that they are driving sales, and they'll keep throwing ad money at anyone who'll take it, in return for hollow promises on placement and effectiveness. Look at TV advertising - year on year advertisers spend £5bn in the UK on TV ads, but who these days watches them, other than mostly care home residents? Of those who watch them, who takes any notice of them? £5bn of largely unproductive waste, made worse by those awful big brand Christmas ads that the producers seem to think is a combination of willy-waving competition and art form.
I can't see any reason why I would want to "chat" to an AI bot on "social" media.
As the article says, FB used to be a decent way to get into touch with friends and keep up with their lives. Now it's a constant dribble of fake celebrity scams, fake products and irrelevant and probably incorrect "news". Oh, and those dreadful "influencers".
The only reason I keep my account is that it is my only means of staying in touch with some overseas friends.
You say can't grow any more, let's just invent engagement, AI says it's prime time for foreign entities/alien forces/novel sources/SMARTR adversaries/almighty competition/diabolical opponents to deploy and enjoy and exploit virtuous virtual entanglement about which only a very small few might have even the faintest of ideas or clue about what needs to be done because of what they are presently doing because there is virtually and practically absolutely nothing that they cannot do .... either for you or to you.
Choose carefully ... for to choose wrongly has dire consequences supplied and executed in as many deserved repercussions as be necessary to render wrong choice results eliminated/null and void/exterminated.
"Although the initial AI fakes have now been pulled,"
.... and replaced with new AI fakes. Without labeling them as such, of course.
See Spotify with gazillion of AI 'artists' with AI-generated music Spotify don't have to buy, but can charge from the listeners.
I'll predict that majority of everything in Spotify will be replaced with AI-generated copies, just because of more profit and growth.
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